Indigenous and Afro-Colombian populations in Colombia are joined by all sectors of country’s environmental movement, in an attempt to block the Government’s new Forestry Law.
This controversial bill will be a tremendous setback for Colombia’s environmental policy, and harmful for the country’s forests and the communities who collective own and manage them. It violates international treaties and agreements ratified by Colombia, and existing national legislation on environment, biodiversity and human rights.
The Forestry Law was initially aimed at providing a legal framework on forests for Colombia’s complex range of environmental statutes and laws. It was designed to establish rules and incentives for plantation forestry, but was later expanded to regulate the management of natural forests, covering 26-28 million hectares, which are collectively owned by indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities. These communities stress that forest is a habitat and not something to be exploited. According to them, this new legislation sees the forests "merely as timber”.
In an open letter to the Colombian Congress, former Environment Ministers were joined by civil society groups and environmentalists in pointing out that the proposed law presents “serious faults, together with legal and conceptual gaps”; it ignores the basic principles behind existing environmental legislation, and has failed to carry out adequate consultation with the communities who are collectively responsible for the greatest areas of Colombia’s natural forests.
The government of Alvaro Uribe is keen on promoting the economic exploitation of forests, arguing that the sector is underdeveloped. The new law overtly favours the timber industry, forest plantations, and companies investing in the privatization of environmental services. It is tantamount to handing over the country’s forests to trans-national timber companies.
In its current form, the Forestry Law disregards all international treaties ratified by Colombia referring to forests, biodiversity and the environment: the Convention on Biological Diversity, ILO Convention 169 on indigenous and tribal peoples, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Forests, the Andean Community's Decision 391 on Access to Genetic Resources, the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. It contravenes national laws on environment and collective territorial rights.
Colombian lawyer and indigenous rights specialist, Roque Roldan, has said that the lack of consultation is a violation of the National Constitution, which grants indigenous and black communities rights over the natural resources in their territories, to administer, use and manage as they see fit.
Manuel Rodriguez, former Environment Minister, says that “Colombia’s forests will be given over to the same companies that have the unenviable record of having razed the tropical forests of South-east Asia. It will allow private monopoly over ‘environmental services’ and allow the privatization of biodiversity, water, air and other ‘services’ provided by forests”.
PLEASE HELP: to expose the intrinsic problems with Colombia’s new Forestry Law, the consequences it will have on forests and on environmental policy, and the risk it poses for the collective rights of indigenous and afro-Colombian communities to over 60% of the country’s forests.
For more information on the Forestry Law, on campaigns in Colombia to prevent this new law, or for direct comment from environmentalists and indigenous representatives in Colombia, please contact:
Martín von Hildebrand, Fundación Gaia Amazonas, Bogotá – Colombia
Tel: +57 1 281 4925/2985, Fax: +57 1 281 4945, Email: coorgaia@cable.net.co
Or, fiona@gaianet.org
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